Portlets - AI, ML, VR & more

Support for content management in portals is another trend that is catching up very well. ( The other trend that I kept talking about is the collaborative portals.) We have seen quite a few happenings recently in this space. eXo Platform SARL came up with eXo Groupware. Liferay came up with Alfresco portlets and JBoss came up with the tie-up with Alfresco. The intention is same - to get entry into this space. In 2004, I had mentioned that open source portals are not really usable for enterprise level portal implementation based on content management needs. Now, all of these portals are either supporting or planning to support JCR (JSR 170). eXo has come up with their own implementation for JCR. Whereas JBoss and Liferay are using Apache Jackrabbit for JCR implementation. Alfresco itself claims to be a portal which is making this space more interesting. I am happy to see that after nearly one and a half year of my post, open source portals started picking up in this space and they are ...

I will be there in 2006 JavaOne conference going-on in San Francisco. We are showcasing our SyncEx Portlets and API . If somebody wants to meet me, I'll be available at booth no. 780. I can also be contacted on the cell +1 309 721 4851 during JavaOne. If you you need free conference passes, please let me know.

Recently I came across the news that Sun Portal is going Open Source. Previously they made it free and this time open source. I am not sure but believe that the motive is to get the community contribution and to compete against companies like IBM and BEA. This also shows the general shift in the strategy of big companies that are focusing more on selling the services rather than the licenses. I am also interested to see how the present open source market changes after it. Presently the open source portal vendors like Liferay, eXo and JBoss are having good market share, at least in terms of the number of installations. It would be good to see the impact of this move on open source portal market. Anyways, check the blog post by Navneet on the same subject.

Stefan Hepper with Peter Fischer, Stephan Hesmer, Richard Jacob and David Sean Taylor has written an excellent book on Portlets and Portal development. Stefan is co-lead of jsr 168 and specification lead for JSR 286 (portlet 2.0). Peter Fischer, Richard Jacob and Stephan Hesmer have led the WSRP team and the implementation of the WSRP specification in IBM's WebSphere Portal v.5.x. David Sean Taylor is the founder of Apache Portals and Jetspeed-2 open source enterprise portal. The manuscript of this book is available for free download from - Portlets and Apache Portals